Immigrants spent months in jail for their opinions. 
People lost their honor, because of their last names. 
This is what happened once before, when Americans, 
in fear and at war, turned on their own. 

Providence Journal
BY Jennifer Levitz 
Journal Staff Writer
October 7, 2001 

The FBI swept through Federal Hill, knocking on doors: Give us your radios, 
your cameras, your flashlights. Your "contraband." 

In one house, a mother cried, her 4-foot-10 frame shaking. She needed her 
radio to hear news of the war. Her four boys were in the U.S. armed forces, 
she said, pointing to silver stars in the window, one for each son. 

On the north side of the city, Frank D'Allesandro, almost 9 and nicknamed 
"dottore" for his dreams of becoming a doctor, was home alone when the 
knocks came. 

The FBI agent used big words. The little boy looked them up in the dictionary, 
after he handed over his BB gun. 

It was December 1941. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States 
declared war on Japan. Benito Mussolini, the histrionic Italian dictator who 
promised he would create an empire, stood with Germany and Japan. 

Italy was now the enemy. 

So were Italian-Americans. 

UNA STORIA SEGRETA , some call it -- the secret history of what befell 
Italian immigrants when the land they adopted looked on them with mistrust. 
Now, 60 years later, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating possible 
violations of the civil rights of these Americans. 

There is support among German-Americans for a similar study of the treatment 
of their immigrants. 

But the Italians will learn of the scope of the injustices against them next 
month, when the Justice Department is scheduled to present the findings of 
the year-long study. 

Explained Justice Department investigater Joanne Chiedi: "The only thing 
wrong was that they were Italian." 

The little-known slice of wartime history is preserved in documents at the 
National Archives. Several boxes of papers were only recently declassified, 
at the request of The Journal. 

These Justice Department and FBI memos, proclamations, and telephone 
transcripts show that the United States, fearing sabotage and shielded from 
constitutional laws by the executive orders of President Franklin Roosevelt, 
seized radios, flashlights, and other "contraband" from Italian-Americans. 
The government restricted their travel, and ordered 10,000 Italian residents 
of the West Coast and some 400 of the East Coast to leave their homes 
because they lived too close to waterways, where they might, the government 
feared, signal enemy ships. 

Some 600,000 noncitizen Italian immigrants -- more than 11,000 in Rhode 
Island -- had to register as card-carrying "enemy aliens." 

As many as 300 Italian-Americans across the country were interned, often 
based on little more than gossip. Of a Providence shoeshine man, the U.S. 
Department of Justice wrote: 

"Subject's persistent talk in praising and boasting of the greatness of the 
Italian people and Italian army while employed in a shoeshining shop 
constitutes downright subversive activity." 

The chaos of war, time, and shame have hidden the story. 

But for many Italian-Americans, memories remain. 

"THEY CAME FOR our radio," says the elderly woman sitting at a long 
table at Federal Hill House, where she goes for the company and the 
two-dollar lunch. 

Her name is Concetta Dell Fave Fagan. 

Over the din of The Pr ice Is Right, she recalls that her father, Michele 
Dell Fave, was a citizen during World War II. Her mother, Antonetta Dell 
Fave, was not. 

After four of the Dell Fave sons had gone off to fight for the United States, 
the family would hover in the kitchen around their radio. They listened for 
news that might mean William, Dominic, Vito, and Joe would soon return. 

An American flag and four Silver Stars, one for each son, hung in the window. 
"You had a Gold Star," notes Fagan, "if your son didn't come home." 

The day the FBI knocked at the door, her mother, just 74 pounds, begged 
the agent not to take the family's radio. She pointed to the stars in the 
window. Her sons were fighting for the United States, she said; why would 
she do anything to hurt this country? 

The agent said he had orders. 

"She was crying," says Fagan, bowing her head to hide tears. "My father 
wasn't. I guess men didn't cry then." 

A table away from Fagan, a man with wispy gray hair slams down a beefy 
arm, shaking his dish of cole slaw. 

"In America?" he demands. "No! In Russia or the old country, maybe. If they
 came in my house, I'd throw them out -- 'Who are you to come in my house? 
You're invading me.' " 

He gives his name only as Sal, and says that he is an Italian-American 
veteran  of World War II. 

At the same table another elderly man, Frank Grelle, holds up a hand, missing 
one finger. He used to sell lemons on Federal Hill; the war took his finger. 
He agrees with his friend. 

"That's right," says Grelle. "[Your property] don't belong to them." 

"It don't belong to them," echoes Sal. "The man is right -- there is no way 
that happened in America." 

AT THE TURN of the last century, Italian immigrants left a country torn by 
joblessness and social unrest. They came to the United States for a better 
life. By 1920, there were 60,000 of them living in Rhode Island. 

Many were laborers who had settled in triple-deckers on Providence's 
Federal Hill, where they walked to the Holy Ghost Church for baptisms, 
weddings, and Mass in Italian. 

The United States was your wife, the saying went; Italy, your mother. 
You honored both. 

So in the 1930s they listened with fascination to their radios, to the leader 
who orated from the Palazzo de Venezia. Benito Mussolini promised he 
would raise Italy to its former Roman glory. He would give land to the 
peasants, and restore order. 

So deep was the longing to protect Italy, that when Mussolini called for gold, 
in 1936, to fight League of Nations economic sanctions, immigrants in Rhode 
Island sent him 100 pounds of wedding bands. 

But in time, it grew risky to speak with passion about Italy, where Il Duce 
was showing himself to be a dictator. Then he signed the "Pact of Steel" 
with Hitler. 

Embarrassment replaced the gushing tributes to Mussolini. 

As Germany toppled country after country, with Italy as its ally, the U.S. 
entry into war against the Axis powers seemed imminent. And in America, 
people started looking at fellow Americans of German or Italian descent in 
a new way. 

The owner of a textile company in Taunton, Mass., L. N. Gebhard, wrote to 
U.S. Atty. Gen. Francis Biddle about Ivan M. Lombardo, a printing-company 
executive of Italian background -- and a friend of Gebhard's. 

Saying that he wished to be "damnably" sure that his friend wasn't a 
"potential enemy agent," Gebhard wrote that Lombardo's expressed hatred 
for Mussolini might in fact be a cover for enemy work. 

"I recognize," wrote Gebhard, in November 1940, "that the more skillful 
enemy agents would cleverly embrace such a position." 

In response, Acting Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Hugh A. Fisher urged Gebhard 
to report any "subversive activities" by Lombardo to the FBI in Boston. 

That year, L'Eco del Rhode Island, the Italian newspaper, celebrated the 
gains of Italian-Americans in the Rhode Island General Assembly. 

But it was not the time to seem too Italian. Ethnic ties could be seen as a 
sign of disloyalty to America. 

Rhode Island's Italian-Americans canceled their Columbus Day parade. 

THEN, they became enemy aliens. 

"All natives, citizens, denizens, and subjects of a hostile nation are alien 
enemies," stated Roosevelt's 1940 Alien Enemy Act. 

In Rhode Island, 11,792 Italian, 692 German, and 11 Japanese residents 
over the age of 14 lined up to register at the Providence post office, 
entering through a side door where mail trucks parked. 

L'Eco del Rhode Island called the registration "grossly un-American and 
fantastically absurd." 

U.S. Attorney General Biddle said the phrase "enemy alien" was a legal 
definition, not a charge of disloyalty. 

But it was. 

And stigma of suspicion spread even to people not classified as enemy 
aliens. 

In Rhode Island, the FBI designated 2,147 Italian-Americans, including 
U.S. citizens, as "potential and active hostile individuals." Even the 
church, the heart of the Italian community, was suspect. 

The U.S. Naval Intelligence Service reported on "alleged fascism" at 13 
Rhode Island Roman Catholic churches. The report said that priests in 
these churches had been brought over from Italy, and that even after 
extended stays in the United States, they spoke little English. The Italian 
government, said the report, awarded the clergymen with medals and other 
honors, in order to keep them "sold." 

The Rev. Flaminio Parenti, pastor of Federal Hill's beloved Holy Ghost 
Church, became a target. 

He had served as pastor since 1922, having come from New York City, 
where he ministered to the needy. In 1930 the Italian Consul in Providence 
gave him the medal bestowed on distinguished Italians who work to extend 
the Italian culture in foreign countries. 

To Lawrence M. C. Smith, the War Department's chief of the neutrality laws, 
writing to the FBI's Hoover in 1942, this award ceremony and others like it 
were opportunities to "spread subtle fascist propaganda." 

"The beauties of Italy are dwelt upon," write Smith, "and then come the 
advances in the past 20 years. It is at this point the speakers become 
expansive on Mussolini." 

Smith noted that at the award ceremonies, the Italian Consul General and 
his staff "occupy the most prominent positions on the platform." 

"They have built themselves up so that the Italians feel that it is a great 
honor [particularly among the poorer element] to be recognized by the 
consular staff," he wrote. 

To fully grasp the significance of such a situation, he wrote, "one must bear 
in mind that the Italian people are a very devout race." 

And loyal. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rhode Island's Italian-American 
leaders rushed to show their patriotism. 

On Dec. 12, 1941, the day after the United States declared war on Italy, 
Providence District Court Judge Luigi de Pasquale read a statement from 
the bench in Providence: 

"We will, in the future, as we have in the past, show undivided loyalty to 
the United States. . . . This is not the time for sentiment except in favor 
of this land." 

THE PLEDGES of loyalty made little difference. Italians were marked. 

In early 1942 , after a Senate committee reported that Japanese-Americans 
had aided Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government stepped up 
its scrutiny of enemy aliens. The report later proved false, but the damage 
was done, according to Larry DiStasi, who has written Una Storia Segreta, 
a book documenting the "secret history" of the treatment of Italian-Americans 
during World War II. 

Most affected were Italians on the West Coast. 

Attorney General Biddle ordered Japanese, Italian, and German aliens -- 
including fishermen -- away from the waterfront of San Francisco. 

Guiseppe DiMaggio could not fish for a living, despite the fact that his son 
Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star for the Yankees, had enlisted in the Army, 
according to another son (a professional ball player for the Red Sox), 
Dominic DiMaggio. He was testifying in 1999 before a congressional committee 
in favor of the Wartime Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act. 

The act, which was adopted that year, was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Eliot 
Engel, a Democrat from New York City, after hearing about DiStasi's book 
and traveling exhibit, about the "secret history." 

The legislation required the government to formally acknowledge that there 
had been a fundamental injustice against Italian-Americans. It directed the 
justice department to report to Congress about immigrants who were affected. 

The justice department's report, according to the act, will allow federal 
agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, to offer such 
things as lectures and exhibits about that chapter of war. 

The report is also expected to examine how apparent xenophobia became 
government policy, and how to prevent it from happening again. 

During wartime, the harshest directive against the immigrants came on 
Feb. 19, 1942, when President Roosevelt signed infamous Executive Order 
9066. It allowed the War Department to declare entire sections of the 
Western states off limits to immigrants from enemy nations. 

The order first forced the relocation of 100,000 people of Japanese descent. 
Then, more than 10,000 people of Italian descent were forced out of their 
homes. 

Humboldt University Prof. Stephen Fox documented the plight of West 
Coast Italian-Americans in his 1990 book, The Unknown Internment. 

"The way the government decided where people had to move from was 
completely arbitrary," he said in an interview. "In Arcata [Calif.] one side 
of the street was off-limits, because it was too close to the water, to ships. . 
. . 
People literally had to move across the street." 

Seeing that the West Coast evacuations were politically toxic, Roosevelt 
stopped plans for evacuations on the East Coast, Fox said. 

But Gen. Hugh A. Drum, head of the Eastern Defense Command, had an 
alternate plan for the East Coast: "exclusions," or evictions, of people who 
had not committed overt acts, but who participated in subversive associations 
or activities. 

What were these associations and activities? 

Philadelphia pediatrician Zefferino Aversa, an American citizen, was given 
10 days to leave his home and move a couple of hours inland. Aversa had 
served in the Royal Italian Army before moving to the United States, in 1928.
And he had a point of view. 

"Blamed Pres. Roosevelt for U.S. Entry in present war. Stated Axis powers 
would give the U.S. a good lesson," says the 1943 report on his case. 

Some officials, including Attorney General Biddle, questioned the 
"reasonableness" of exclusions. He wrote: "Most cases simply involved 
uninfluential people who in opinions, exhibited sympathy for . . . the 
countries of their birth." 

Along the East Coast, Italians had to turn in short-wave radios, so they could 
not pick up Italian news. Cameras and flashlights were contraband; being 
caught with invisible ink was a crime. 

On Federal Hill, Tomasso Baccari gave up his radio. It "hurt him profoundly," 
says his son. 

TOMASSO BACCARI HAD moved to the United States in 1905, for the 
golden opportunity. But, says his son, Vincent Baccari, he struggled to find 
the gold. 

He was a bricklayer. His wife stretched a nickel's worth of cornmeal and a 
few tomatoes into Italian polenta. When his children's shoes wore thin, he 
placed cardboard in the soles. And on Sundays he listened to his radio as 
Mussolini promised to restore the splendor of imperial Rome. 

"There would be tears in his eyes," says his son. "He was torn between the 
land he was born in and loved, and the land he adopted." 

In the wake of the Alien Enemy Act, the younger Baccari dutifully put the 
radio on his shoulder and walked from Federal Hill's Rich Street to the 
police station. 

"He was not going to be an enemy," he says of his father. "He was going to 
be a friend. 

"He was devastated-- he didn't understand. He had been a lawful citizen, 
God-fearing and lawful." 

His father never said much about the radio, says Baccari, nor did he tell 
friends, for fear of appearing un-American. 

"Let it die, let it die," he said. 

Vincent Baccari, now a retired lawyer and still living on Federal Hill, sits in 
the lobby of the Veterans Administration hospital after a monthly meeting 
of the Rhode Island Italian-American War Veterans. 

One of the men quietly says to a visitor, "Do you know who we are?" He holds 
up a red overseas cap, adorned with pins. 

More than half a million Italian-Americans fought for the United States in 
World War II. 

"We want an apology from the U.S. government," says Baccari. "We want 
them to say, 'Yes, we were wrong.' " 

That's right, says Antonio Alfano, 81, another veteran. "Because they took 
the sons of aliens." 

"We contributed," says Baccari. 

Dante DiManna, 83, nods. "Four years, nine months, and fourteen days." 

The men walk outside, where an American flag waves in the warm breeze. 

...FRANK D'ALLESANDRO is not sure why the FBI picked his family's 
house to raid. 

The doctor, now 68, recalls his story as he sits at home, on Providence's 
Smith Hill. The fragrance of basil flows in from his garden; mementos from 
his grandfather's and father's voyage to Ellis Island rest on a shelf in his 
study. 

D'Allesandro was almost 9 years old and home alone, in the family's North 
End house. 

His father, who had a job at a shipyard, was at work. So was his grandfather, 
a stone mason. His mother had died. 

"There were two big fellows," he begins, "and they had two or three sheets 
of paper. They said, 'We have the right to come in your house.' " 

Little Frank -- also called Dottore, for his dream of becoming a doctor -- 
knew there would be hell to pay from his father if he let the strangers in. 
So he took the papers upstairs to a neighbor; they have the authority, said 
the neighbor. 

So the two men entered the house, where they rummaged through drawers 
and cupboards. They took a camera, and gun parts that D'Allesandro's father 
had collected to build a target pistol. 

The men grabbed the family's flashlight. 

They found Frank's BB gun -- the best one on the street. He could hit pear 
stems, knocking pears, intact, out of the tree. 

"Wait!" said Frank. "You can't take my BB gun. It's expensive -- it's mine. 
It's my gun." 

The men tried to take the short-wave radio, but they couldn't carry the 
clunky floor model out on their own. They'd be back. 

When would he get his gun back?, asked young Frank. The gun was gone, 
said the men, "for the duration." 

"I looked up 'duration' in the dictionary," says D'Allesandro. "I didn't 
understand." 

The FBI agents returned for the radio on a Saturday, when Frank's father 
and grandfather were home. Neither of them was a U.S. citizen. The agents 
ordered the D'Allesandro men to carry their own radio out of the house. 

Frank's grandfather, Rocco, was five feet tall and about as wide, with a 
mason's grip. 

"My grandfather wanted to tackle them and throw them out," says the 
doctor, "but my father said no -- they would only be back with more papers 
and things. He said we had to go along with it," especially since he had 
begun his citizenship application. "He wanted to be American." 

THE TRAVEL restrictions caused chaos. 

Josephine Cavarretta, of Uxbridge, Mass., wrote to Attorney General Biddle 
for permission to drive to Providence to shop: 

"We have four children, Rita, Anna, Anthony, and Rosanna, and they need 
clothes and shoes, but often, in Uxbridge, we don't find what we need." 
She signed her letter, of June 15, 1942, "Your very loyal" Josephine and 
Joseph Cavarretta. 

Her daughter Anna included her own letter. She was 17, American-born, and 
wanted her camera back from the police, to which it had been dutifully turned 
over: 

"I miss my camera very much. . . . I belong to a camera club which I am very 
interested in, and I need the camera to belong to it. If you would give me the 
special permission so that I may have my camera back, I would be grateful 
to you." 

A month later, the Cavarrettas received a reply. They were told to apply for a 
travel permit with the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston. No mention was made 
of Anna's camera. 

It seems astounding that even Italian-Americans who wanted to visit relatives 
in the U.S. services had to get permission to travel. Teresa Buccelli, in New 
Jersey, requested permission to see her husband in Rhode Island, where he 
was stationed with the Navy. 

Writing in perfect English -- she had lived in the United States for 20 of her 
22 years and was awaiting her citizenship papers -- she said: 

"We want to be with him [my baby and I], for he may be here today and 
gone tomorrow and only God knows if we will ever see him again." 

An executive order by Attorney General Biddle allowed each state to set up 
its own "Alien Enemy Hearing Board," made up of prominent citizens 
appointed by the state's U.S. Attorney. 

The hearing board did not have to follow constitutional laws. The accused 
were not allowed attorneys. The charges were murky. "Pro-fascist" was a 
standard one. 

One alleged threat to national security was Providence shoeshine man 
Federico Dellegatta. 

He was a middle-aged bachelor who had moved from Italy about 15 years 
before. He lived in a rooming house on Federal Hill or in a city wood yard 
known as the "Hobo Jungle." 

He worked at Giso Brothers' Shoe Shop in downtown Providence, near a 
felt-hat shop, and the Providence USO. 

He was 5 feet 4 inches tall, but big on bluff, known on busy Westminster 
Street as a harmless, if pesky, blowhard. He spouted in his thick Italian 
accent about the greed of the rich, the better life back home in Italy -- and 
of course, about WWII. 

His downfall came one muggy Friday morning in August of 1942, when a 
businessman stopped in and ordered a polish. 

The businessman sat in the elevated chair, reading the headlines from his 
three-cent newspaper. 

It was wartime news. American fliers had downed four "zeros." And a U.S. 
federal judge had sentenced a German-born Michigan man to hang for 
aiding an escaped German pilot who fled to Detroit. 

"That's one less Nazi that we will have to deal with," snorted the customer, 
according to the FBI's dossier on the bootblack. 

Dellegatta was quick with a rebuttal, saying the convicted traitor did not 
deserve a hanging, that he had only been doing his duty as a German. He 
kept up, raising his voice to declare that he was Italian, proud of it, and that 
Italy was winning the war. The customer took keen note of Dellegatta's rant, 
and he promptly reported it to the FBI. 

The investigation, of the talkative shoeshine man was on. 

Agents visited his residence, a Federal Hill rooming house. 

Dellegatta's landlord had never heard him express his opinions about the 
war, but she was quite sure he was "pro-Italy in general." 

An agent arrested him late one afternoon, searching his room. They found 
his only property -- two extra shirts. 

Rhode Island's U.S. attorney, George F. Troy, wrote that very day of the 
captive in a telegram to the Alien Enemy Control Unit at the Justice 
Department in Washington, D.C. 

The telegram said: "Person deemed by me on reliable information 
dangerous to public peace and safety . . . frequently since declaration of 
war, U.S. against Italy, has publicly and privately praised Mussolini. Said 
people of U.S. no good . . . said newspaper accounts of Italian defeats are 
damn lies." 

Dellegatta appeared before Rhode Island's "Alien Enemy Hearing Board," 
which included John S. Murdock, a retired Rhode Island Supreme Court 
judge, and Arthur H. Bradford, a pastor at Central Congregational Church, 
in Providence. 

The board went fairly easy. It found that Dellegatta's "chief offense was 
that he has indulged in irresponsible talk about the greatness of the Italian 
people," and recommended parole. 

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wasn't taking any chances on the Providence 
shoeshine man. 

He wrote to Attorney GeneralBiddle on Oct. 8, 1942: 

"It is evident that this subject is entirely loyal to Italy. It is believed that the 
only way to insure the safety of the United States from an individual of this 
type is to intern him. It is suggested that Dellegatta be interned for the 
duration of the war." 

Dellegatta was transported by freight train to a round of internment camps -- 
Fort Meade, Md., Fort Missoula, Mont., Fort McAlester, Okla. He wrote 
letters, offering suggestions of friends who could vouch for his character. 
In replies, he was refused another hearing. 

Instead, he was internee number 2-8-I-50. 

BARBER AMLETO CAFARO was deemed a dangerous man too. 

Cafaro, 35, had lived in the United States since he was 11. One of nine 
children, he quit school in Providence in the fifth grade and shined shoes 
and cut hair. 

Filled with wanderlust, he had enlisted in Italy's Ethiopian campaign when 
he was in his 20s so he could see the world. 

He returned to try to register for the U.S. Army, which rejected him because 
he was not yet a U.S. citizen. His brother, however, was a citizen, and 
joined the Army. 

Back in Providence, he cut hair, joined a drama club, and became known 
as a talker. 

One day, in August 1942, he arrived at his place of work, Menard's Barber 
Shop, in Warwick. He snapped open his newspaper and declared that the 
United States was only in the war because Wall Street and the rich 
manufacturers wanted to make big profits. He said he would have no part 
of it. 

Then he teased the owner's son, a G.I. on home leave, making fun of the 
stripes on his uniform and saying that he was going to take his girl dancing 
while he was away. 

Someone called the FBI, who began building a case. 

Cafaro's 73-year-old neighbor told agents that she "frequently heard him 
state that Roosevelt had broken his promise not to send American boys 
to fight on foreign soil," shows the FBI file on Cafaro. 

Third-hand tales went into the FBI file as well. 

"Mr. Menard also recalled arguments Cafaro had with customers in the 
barber shop and one in particular when he told Jerry the bartender at the 
Log Cabin in West Warwick that Italy was a better country than the United 
States. Mr. Menard said he remembered this argument because Jerry 
became so angry that he left the shop while Cafaro had only half finished 
cutting his hair," the FBI report states. 

Agents arrested Cafaro at home in Silver Lake on Sept. 10, 1942. 

He pledged his loyalty to the United States before Providence's Alien 
Enemy Hearing Board. 

He told them he was opposed to the war only because he had relatives in 
the Italian Army and a brother in the U.S. service. He did not want to see 
them die. 

The board found him harmless: "The impression that he made upon the 
board was that he was an Italian prone to indulge in loose talk and imbued 
with a real love for his native land." 

Again, FBI Director Hoover suggested internment. 

Attorney General Biddle wrote up the final order: 

"Whereas, Amleto Cafaro, of Providence, Rhode Island . . . has heretofore 
been apprehended as being potentially dangerous to the public peace and 
safety of the United States. 

"Whereas, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board had recommended that said 
alien enemy be paroled; and it appearing from the evidence before me that 
said alien enemy should be interned; NOW, THEREFORE, IT IS 
ORDERED that said alien enemy be interned. 

WHILE THE BARBER and the shoeshine man sat in jail, most enemy 
aliens, as they were called, felt their stigma lift. 

With Mussolini's fascist regime crumbling, Biddle lifted the enemy alien 
label from Italian Americans before a cheering crowd at Carnegie Hall, on 
Columbus Day 1942. 

His office had "investigated thoroughly all Italians in the nation in an 
unprecedented exercise of wartime vigilance," he said, in an announcement, 
broadcast throughout the United States and Europe. 

"We found that 600,000 enemy aliens were in fact not enemies," he said. 

Biddle also said that Italians were abundantly represented among the 
soldiers decorated for heroism after Pearl Harbor. 

Mussolini was ousted from power the following September; Biddle began 
releasing Italian-American captives at internment camps. 

Dellegatta returned to Providence, to shining shoes. 

Cafaro, the barber, was released from Fort Missoula, Mont., where he had 
lived among Italian seamen captured as POWs. 

Cafaro's hearing board was a group of town folk who lived near the base, a 
desolate cluster of barracks formerly used to house army mechanics. 

He had rated average on his "internee behavior reports." Sure, he had 
made a few remarks, about a negotiated peace agreement, but he had 
worked well at the camp, and had not aligned himself with the more 
anti-American internees, his behavior report states. 

The hearing board noted: "The chief impression created by the alien at his 
rehearing is that he is a perfectly honest barber who has talked too much." 

THE WARTIME Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, which 
resulted in the year-long study that will be considered by Congress next 
month, does not call for a formal apology or reparations, such as those 
given to Japanese-Americans who suffered on a much greater scale during 
the war. 

It calls for adding the history to textbooks. 

"I think this report is going to do a lot for the Italian community," said 
Chiedi, the Justice Department investigator who has traveled the country 
to collect stories. "There is still an anger, not at the government, but inside. 
Others say, 'If I didn't know about this, what else didn't I know?' " 

DiStasi, author of Una Storia Segreta, says that even if Italians did not know
what happened to their ancestors during World War II, they felt it. 

Their stigma, he said, froze Italian-American culture. 

Immigrants felt pressure to improve their situations and become more 
"Americanized." 

"The effects -- culture loss, a sense that many Italian-Americans don't know 
who they are -- are with us still," he says. 

ELENA CAFARO, Amleto's younger sister, still lives in the white Silver Lake 
cottage that her family bought in 1915. 

It is the house where the FBI came to pick up her brother, Amleto. 

She refers to him as "Hamlet." 

She is 90, the only one left of 9 siblings. She looks frail, but her handshake 
is strong and sure. 

She is delighted to talk about the past, and brings out old photo albums, 
filled with black-and-white pictures that are curling off yellowed pages. 
She sets them on her table, using her magnifying glass to read the fine 
print that tells the stories of outings and holidays. 

"Hamlet," she says, pointing to a picture of a stocky, balding man, with 
rimless glasses and a blank expression. 

He had "ordinary looks," but he was "love 'em and leave 'em," she recalls, 
laughing. 

"He was one that used to like to go around," she says. "He must have 
had something." 

She walks through a curtain and up narrow stairs, to a second floor that 
seems frozen in time. She walks into her mother's old room, where a fancy 
brush and hand mirror still sit on the bureau. 

She goes into Amleto's room, where the lifelong bachelor lived until he died 
in 1973. He died a U.S. citizen. 

If Amleto ever mentioned his stay at internment camps, she does not recall. 

She remembers it differently. Better. During WWII, she worked for the 
American Red Cross in Rome. She heard something, from her brothers 
and sisters back in Providence, about men coming to the house for Amleto. 
But she has always believed they were summoning her brother for the draft. 

She is correct about the military service. 

As a condition for his release from a Montana internment camp, Cafaro 
made a promise: He would be willing to join the U.S. armed forces. 

The barber considered too dangerous to walk the streets of Providence 
during the war was released from internment camp, and ordered to be 
inducted into the U.S. Army in January 1944. 

That year, Elena heard a knock on her door in Rome. 

It was Amleto. 

"I was so surprised," she said, smiling and putting her hands to her mouth. 

Amleto wore the uniform of America. 

END.....

Complete Article at  http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/story.pl/extra/terror/06309581.htm